OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Can Large Language Models Design Accurate Label Functions?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Programmatic weak supervision methodologies facilitate the expedited labeling of extensive datasets through the use of label functions (LFs) that encapsulate heuristic data sources. Nonetheless, the creation of precise LFs necessitates domain expertise and substantial endeavors. Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have exhibited substantial potential across diverse tasks. However, the capacity of PLMs to autonomously formulate accurate LFs remains an underexplored domain. In this research, we address this gap by introducing DataSculpt, an interactive framework that harnesses PLMs for the automated generation of LFs. Within DataSculpt, we incorporate an array of prompting techniques, instance selection strategies, and LF filtration methods to explore the expansive design landscape. Ultimately, we conduct a thorough assessment of DataSculpt's performance on 12 real-world datasets, encompassing a range of tasks. This evaluation unveils both the strengths and limitations of contemporary PLMs in LF design.
Challenges for Linguistically-Driven Computer-Based Sign Recognition from Continuous Signing for American Sign Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

There have been recent advances in computer-based recognition of isolated, citation-form signs from video. There are many challenges for such a task, not least the naturally occurring inter- and intra- signer synchronic variation in sign production, including sociolinguistic variation in the realization of certain signs. However, there are several significant factors that make recognition of signs from continuous signing an even more difficult problem. This article presents an overview of such challenges, based in part on findings from a large corpus of linguistically annotated video data for American Sign Language (ASL). Some linguistic regularities in the structure of signs that can boost handshape and sign recognition are also discussed.
An Integrated Approach to Aerial Grasping: Combining a Bistable Gripper with Adaptive Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Grasping using an aerial robot can have many applications ranging from infrastructure inspection and maintenance to precise agriculture. However, aerial grasping is a challenging problem since the robot has to maintain an accurate position and orientation relative to the grasping object, while negotiating various forms of uncertainties (e.g., contact force from the object). To address such challenges, in this paper, we integrate a novel passive gripper design and advanced adaptive control methods to enable robust aerial grasping. The gripper is enabled by a pre-stressed band with two stable states (a flat shape and a curled shape). In this case, it can automatically initiate the grasping process upon contact with an object. The gripper also features a cable-driven system by a single DC motor to open the gripper without using cumbersome pneumatics. Since the gripper is passively triggered and initially has a straight shape, it can function without precisely aligning the gripper with the object (within an $80$ mm tolerance). Our adaptive control scheme eliminates the need for any a priori knowledge (nominal or upper bounds) of uncertainties. The closed-loop stability of the system is analyzed via Lyapunov-based method. Combining the gripper and the adaptive control, we conduct comparative real-time experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed integrated system for grasping. Our integrated approach can pave the way to enhance aerial grasping for different applications.
Conformalized Deep Splines for Optimal and Efficient Prediction Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Uncertainty estimation is critical in high-stakes machine learning applications. One effective way to estimate uncertainty is conformal prediction, which can provide predictive inference with statistical coverage guarantees. We present a new conformal regression method, Spline Prediction Intervals via Conformal Estimation (SPICE), that estimates the conditional density using neural-network-parameterized splines. We prove universal approximation and optimality results for SPICE, which are empirically validated by our experiments. SPICE is compatible with two different efficient-to-compute conformal scores, one oracle-optimal for marginal coverage (SPICE-ND) and the other asymptotically optimal for conditional coverage (SPICE-HPD). Results on benchmark datasets demonstrate SPICE-ND models achieve the smallest average prediction set sizes, including average size reductions of nearly 50% for some datasets compared to the next best baseline. SPICE-HPD models achieve the best conditional coverage compared to baselines. The SPICE implementation is made available.
Measuring the Impact of Distractors on Student Learning Gains while Using Proof Blocks
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Background: Proof Blocks is a software tool that enables students to construct proofs by assembling prewritten lines and gives them automated feedback. Prior work on learning gains from Proof Blocks has focused on comparing learning gains from Proof Blocks against other learning activities such as writing proofs or reading. Purpose: The study described in this paper aims to compare learning gains from different variations of Proof Blocks. Specifically, we attempt to quantify the difference in learning gains for students who complete Proof Blocks problems with and without distractors. Methods: We conducted a randomized controlled trial with three experimental groups: a control group that completed an off-topic Proof Blocks activity, one that completed a \tool{} activity without distractors, and one that completed a Proof Blocks activity with distractors. All three groups read a book chapter on proof by induction before completing their activity. Findings: The group that completed the Proof Blocks activity with distractors performed better on the posttest than the group that completed the Proof Blocks without distractors, who in turn performed better than the group that completed the off-topic Proof Blocks activity. However, none of these differences were statistically significant. While the results of this study are inconclusive, we hope that it can serve as a foundation for future work.
Faster Peace via Inclusivity: An Efficient Paradigm to Understand Populations in Conflict Zones
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

United Nations practice shows that inclusivity is vital for mediation to be successful in helping end violent conflict and establish lasting peace. However, current methods for understanding the views and needs of populations during dynamic situations create tension between inclusivity and efficiency. This work introduces a novel paradigm to mitigate such tension. In partnership with collaborators at the United Nations we develop a realtime large-scale synchronous dialogue process (RLSDP) to understand stakeholder populations on an hour timescale. We demonstrate a machine learning model which enables each dialogue cycle to take place on a minute-timescale. We manage a key risk related to machine learning result trustworthiness by computing result confidence from a fast and reliable estimation of posterior variance. Lastly, we highlight a constellation of risks stemming from this new paradigm and suggest policies to mitigate them.
User Experiences with Third-Party SIM Cards and ID Registration in Kenya and Tanzania
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Mobile money services in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have increased access to financial services. To ensure proper identification of users, countries have put in place Know-Your-Customer (KYC) measures such as SIM registration using an official identification. However, half of the 850 million people without IDs globally live in SSA, and the use of SIM cards registered in another person's name (third-party SIM) is prevalent. In this study, we explore challenges that contribute to and arise from the use of third-party SIM cards. We interviewed 36 participants in Kenya and Tanzania. Our results highlight great strides in ID accessibility, but also highlight numerous institutional and social factors that contribute to the use of third-party SIM cards. While privacy concerns contribute to the use of third-party SIM cards, third-party SIM card users are exposed to significant security and privacy risks, including scams, financial loss, and wrongful arrest.
On The Open Prompt Challenge In Conditional Audio Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Text-to-audio generation (TTA) produces audio from a text description, learning from pairs of audio samples and hand-annotated text. However, commercializing audio generation is challenging as user-input prompts are often under-specified when compared to text descriptions used to train TTA models. In this work, we treat TTA models as a ``blackbox'' and address the user prompt challenge with two key insights: (1) User prompts are generally under-specified, leading to a large alignment gap between user prompts and training prompts. (2) There is a distribution of audio descriptions for which TTA models are better at generating higher quality audio, which we refer to as ``audionese''. To this end, we rewrite prompts with instruction-tuned models and propose utilizing text-audio alignment as feedback signals via margin ranking learning for audio improvements. On both objective and subjective human evaluations, we observed marked improvements in both text-audio alignment and music audio quality.
RPCANet: Deep Unfolding RPCA Based Infrared Small Target Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning (DL) networks have achieved remarkable performance in infrared small target detection (ISTD). However, these structures exhibit a deficiency in interpretability and are widely regarded as black boxes, as they disregard domain knowledge in ISTD. To alleviate this issue, this work proposes an interpretable deep network for detecting infrared dim targets, dubbed RPCANet. Specifically, our approach formulates the ISTD task as sparse target extraction, low-rank background estimation, and image reconstruction in a relaxed Robust Principle Component Analysis (RPCA) model. By unfolding the iterative optimization updating steps into a deep-learning framework, time-consuming and complex matrix calculations are replaced by theory-guided neural networks. RPCANet detects targets with clear interpretability and preserves the intrinsic image feature, instead of directly transforming the detection task into a matrix decomposition problem. Extensive experiments substantiate the effectiveness of our deep unfolding framework and demonstrate its trustworthy results, surpassing baseline methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
Research Team Identification Based on Representation Learning of Academic Heterogeneous Information Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Academic networks in the real world can usually be described by heterogeneous information networks composed of multi-type nodes and relationships. Some existing research on representation learning for homogeneous information networks lacks the ability to explore heterogeneous information networks in heterogeneous information networks. It cannot be applied to heterogeneous information networks. Aiming at the practical needs of effectively identifying and discovering scientific research teams from the academic heterogeneous information network composed of massive and complex scientific and technological big data, this paper proposes a scientific research team identification method based on representation learning of academic heterogeneous information networks. The attention mechanism at node level and meta-path level learns low-dimensional, dense and real-valued vector representations on the basis of retaining the rich topological information of nodes in the network and the semantic information based on meta-paths, and realizes effective identification and discovery of scientific research teams and important team members in academic heterogeneous information networks based on maximizing node influence. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the comparative methods.
M2T2: Multi-Task Masked Transformer for Object-centric Pick and Place
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

With the advent of large language models and large-scale robotic datasets, there has been tremendous progress in high-level decision-making for object manipulation. These generic models are able to interpret complex tasks using language commands, but they often have difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution objects due to the inability of low-level action primitives. In contrast, existing task-specific models excel in low-level manipulation of unknown objects, but only work for a single type of action. To bridge this gap, we present M2T2, a single model that supplies different types of low-level actions that work robustly on arbitrary objects in cluttered scenes. M2T2 is a transformer model which reasons about contact points and predicts valid gripper poses for different action modes given a raw point cloud of the scene. Trained on a large-scale synthetic dataset with 128K scenes, M2T2 achieves zero-shot sim2real transfer on the real robot, outperforming the baseline system with state-of-the-art task-specific models by about 19% in overall performance and 37.5% in challenging scenes where the object needs to be re-oriented for collision-free placement. M2T2 also achieves state-of-the-art results on a subset of language conditioned tasks in RLBench. Videos of robot experiments on unseen objects in both real world and simulation are available on our project website https://m2-t2.github.io.
SatBird: Bird Species Distribution Modeling with Remote Sensing and Citizen Science Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation policy planning. However, traditional methods in ecology for species distribution models (SDMs) generally focus either on narrow sets of species or narrow geographical areas and there remain significant knowledge gaps about the distribution of species. A major reason for this is the limited availability of data traditionally used, due to the prohibitive amount of effort and expertise required for traditional field monitoring. The wide availability of remote sensing data and the growing adoption of citizen science tools to collect species observations data at low cost offer an opportunity for improving biodiversity monitoring and enabling the modelling of complex ecosystems. We introduce a novel task for mapping bird species to their habitats by predicting species encounter rates from satellite images, and present SatBird, a satellite dataset of locations in the USA with labels derived from presence-absence observation data from the citizen science database eBird, considering summer (breeding) and winter seasons. We also provide a dataset in Kenya representing low-data regimes. We additionally provide environmental data and species range maps for each location. We benchmark a set of baselines on our dataset, including SOTA models for remote sensing tasks. SatBird opens up possibilities for scalably modelling properties of ecosystems worldwide.
Blending Reward Functions via Few Expert Demonstrations for Faithful and Accurate Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The development of trustworthy conversational information-seeking systems relies on dialogue models that can generate faithful and accurate responses based on relevant knowledge texts. However, two main challenges hinder this task. Firstly, language models may generate hallucinations due to data biases present in their pretraining corpus. Secondly, knowledge texts often contain redundant and irrelevant information that distracts the model's attention from the relevant text span. Previous works use additional data annotations on the knowledge texts to learn a knowledge identification module in order to bypass irrelevant information, but collecting such high-quality span annotations can be costly. In this work, we leverage reinforcement learning algorithms to overcome the above challenges by introducing a novel reward function. Our reward function combines an accuracy metric and a faithfulness metric to provide a balanced quality judgment of generated responses, which can be used as a cost-effective approximation to a human preference reward model when only a few preference annotations are available. Empirical experiments on two conversational information-seeking datasets demonstrate that our method can compete with other strong supervised learning baselines.
IndoToD: A Multi-Domain Indonesian Benchmark For End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems have been mostly created for high-resource languages, such as English and Chinese. However, there is a need to develop ToD systems for other regional or local languages to broaden their ability to comprehend the dialogue contexts in various languages. This paper introduces IndoToD, an end-to-end multi domain ToD benchmark in Indonesian. We extend two English ToD datasets to Indonesian, comprising four different domains by delexicalization to efficiently reduce the size of annotations. To ensure a high-quality data collection, we hire native speakers to manually translate the dialogues. Along with the original English datasets, these new Indonesian datasets serve as an effective benchmark for evaluating Indonesian and English ToD systems as well as exploring the potential benefits of cross-lingual and bilingual transfer learning approaches.
Detecting Generated Images by Real Images Only
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

As deep learning technology continues to evolve, the images yielded by generative models are becoming more and more realistic, triggering people to question the authenticity of images. Existing generated image detection methods detect visual artifacts in generated images or learn discriminative features from both real and generated images by massive training. This learning paradigm will result in efficiency and generalization issues, making detection methods always lag behind generation methods. This paper approaches the generated image detection problem from a new perspective: Start from real images. By finding the commonality of real images and mapping them to a dense subspace in feature space, the goal is that generated images, regardless of their generative model, are then projected outside the subspace. As a result, images from different generative models can be detected, solving some long-existing problems in the field. Experimental results show that although our method was trained only by real images and uses 99.9\% less training data than other deep learning-based methods, it can compete with state-of-the-art methods and shows excellent performance in detecting emerging generative models with high inference efficiency. Moreover, the proposed method shows robustness against various post-processing. These advantages allow the method to be used in real-world scenarios.
Cooperative Label-Free Moving Target Fencing for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems with Rigid Formation
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a label-free controller for a second-order multi-agent system to cooperatively fence a moving target of variational velocity into a convex hull formed by the agents whereas maintaining a rigid formation. Therein, no label is predetermined for a specified agent. To attain a rigid formation with guaranteed collision avoidance, each controller consists of two terms: a dynamic regulator with an internal model to drive agents towards the moving target merely by position information feedback, and a repulsive force between each pair of adjacent agents. Significantly, sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop systems governed by the proposed fencing controller. Rigorous analysis is provided to eliminate the strong nonlinear couplings induced by the label-free property. Finally, the effectiveness of the controller is substantiated by numerical simulations.
Overhead Line Defect Recognition Based on Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Overhead line inspection greatly benefits from defect recognition using visible light imagery. Addressing the limitations of existing feature extraction techniques and the heavy data dependency of deep learning approaches, this paper introduces a novel defect recognition framework. This is built on the Faster RCNN network and complemented by unsupervised semantic segmentation. The approach involves identifying the type and location of the target equipment, utilizing semantic segmentation to differentiate between the device and its backdrop, and finally employing similarity measures and logical rules to categorize the type of defect. Experimental results indicate that this methodology focuses more on the equipment rather than the defects when identifying issues in overhead lines. This leads to a notable enhancement in accuracy and exhibits impressive adaptability. Thus, offering a fresh perspective for automating the inspection of distribution network equipment.
CML-MOTS: Collaborative Multi-task Learning for Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The advancement of computer vision has pushed visual analysis tasks from still images to the video domain. In recent years, video instance segmentation, which aims to track and segment multiple objects in video frames, has drawn much attention for its potential applications in various emerging areas such as autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, and smart retail. In this paper, we propose an effective framework for instance-level visual analysis on video frames, which can simultaneously conduct object detection, instance segmentation, and multi-object tracking. The core idea of our method is collaborative multi-task learning which is achieved by a novel structure, named associative connections among detection, segmentation, and tracking task heads in an end-to-end learnable CNN. These additional connections allow information propagation across multiple related tasks, so as to benefit these tasks simultaneously. We evaluate the proposed method extensively on KITTI MOTS and MOTS Challenge datasets and obtain quite encouraging results.
Scalable Probabilistic Forecasting in Retail with Gradient Boosted Trees: A Practitioner's Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The recent M5 competition has advanced the state-of-the-art in retail forecasting. However, we notice important differences between the competition challenge and the challenges we face in a large e-commerce company. The datasets in our scenario are larger (hundreds of thousands of time series), and e-commerce can afford to have a larger assortment than brick-and-mortar retailers, leading to more intermittent data. To scale to larger dataset sizes with feasible computational effort, firstly, we investigate a two-layer hierarchy and propose a top-down approach to forecasting at an aggregated level with less amount of series and intermittency, and then disaggregating to obtain the decision-level forecasts. Probabilistic forecasts are generated under distributional assumptions. Secondly, direct training at the lower level with subsamples can also be an alternative way of scaling. Performance of modelling with subsets is evaluated with the main dataset. Apart from a proprietary dataset, the proposed scalable methods are evaluated using the Favorita dataset and the M5 dataset. We are able to show the differences in characteristics of the e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail datasets. Notably, our top-down forecasting framework enters the top 50 of the original M5 competition, even with models trained at a higher level under a much simpler setting.